With the impending merger of IPG and Omnicom set to create yet another ‘super-entity’ on the agency scene, it’s important to remember that creativity – and not profit, is still the be-all and end-all when it comes to crafting truly great work.
Founded during the Covid pandemic in 2020, Copenhagen’s Worth Your While is a direct reaction against overly corporate, large-scale agency networks.
Spearheaded by partner Morten Ingemann (standing, second from left) and Australian creative director Tim Pashen (kneeling, right), the agency is at the forefront of a revolution of sorts, operating as part of the global co-operative By The Network.
Openly shunning the capitalist values that have for so long defined the industry, By The Network’s front page boldly proclaims its counter-cultural raison d’être: “We are not owned by money, nor are we driven by short-term profits.”
And as the leviathans of the past 50 years increasingly begin to creak and groan under the weight of their bloated portfolios, it isn’t hard to see why smaller, more nimble agencies like Worth Your While are proving increasingly popular not only with brands, but also with top creative talent.
Creativity unbound
This flexibility is one of the main reasons why Pashen decided to swap the network agency life with Accenture Song for something altogether more holistic with Worth Your While.
The Danish indie offered him an attractively uncompromising take on creative integrity, with the quality of the work, and not the tightness of the purse-strings dictating matters. Unsurprisingly, a by-product of this greater freedom has been the quality of the agency’s creative output.
Growing steadily year-on-year, the agency’s success both at home and abroad is an ongoing testament to its co-operative model, which has enabled it to shake off the shackles of bureaucracy.
“You might die tomorrow, make it worth your while,” Pashen explains.
“When I was in the Accenture machine, I remember thinking, ‘I’m working a weekend on an ad that nobody’s gonna watch, missing a friend’s birthday, and if I got hit by a bus tomorrow and died, is that it? Is that what I died doing? Making a s**t ad that no one’s going to see?'”
Recalling the environment in which the agency was established, Ingemann continues: “[Worth Your While] was founded on the philosophy that you must be able to do better creative work. That sounds really simple, and every creative agency should be doing that, but for some reason, the moment you get bigger, at some point politics takes over, and you don’t have the idea at the centre of what you do anymore.”
“So, in trying to do that [we] created an agency where the name was super important and it became our North Star, Worth Your While, because it’s built on the philosophy that my time has to be spent with you. When we do work for clients, it has to be worth your while, and it has to be worth my while – but internally, at our own pace,” he added.
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Liverpool calling
On the UK market, Worth Your While has already produced several highly popular campaigns in its short lifetime, notably working with Danish powerhouse Carlsberg on its partnership with Liverpool FC and ethnic equality campaign group People Like Us.
The time and care put into each campaign is clear to see, and the results garnered clearly justify the agency’s operational model. Naturally, a Copenhagen-based agency might be best served to understand what makes a historic Danish brand like Carlsberg tick, but its ability to capture the relationship between the football club and its legions of devoted fans is what has made these campaigns so special.
On the occasion of Liverpool’s decision to extend its partnership with Carlsberg for another ten years, the agency produced “10 More Years. Inked”, which saw an ad crafted out of stop-motion tattoo animations of Liverpool stars via the skin of ultra-dedicated fans.
Detailing the unorthodox creative process, Pashen says: “There’s actually fans out there that have such detailed tattoos of Liverpool players, even the Carlsberg logo was tattooed onto their bodies, which is a priceless thing that even Apple or Nike would pay millions for.
“And that gave us the thought: Could we tell a stop motion story where every storyboard frame was tattooed on a real Liverpool fan? And that became the canvas for 10 More Years. Inked.”
On a more serious note, Worth Your While has also found critical acclaim from London Mayor Sadiq Khan, no less for its ‘Autocorrect Pay Gap’ campaign for People Like Us, which spotlighted the inherent bias against diverse names, which are frequently erroneously corrected to Anglophone ones by the software.
If your name is autocorrected, chances are your pay packet might be too.
Nobody should be paid less because of the colour of their skin. That’s why I’m supporting this campaign from non-profit People Like Us asking the Govt to introduce mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting.
— Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan (@MayorofLondon) April 3, 2023
The work formed part of the action group’s campaign for greater ethnicity pay gap reporting within the ad industry, to ensure greater equality between white and BAME staff.
“It’s based on an incredibly simple observation, that is due to the white default that’s baked into technology. [People Like Us] briefed us on trying to help close the ethnicity pay gap, which was a new terminology, and wasn’t really in the common parlance,” Pashen said.
“You’d had the gender pay gap, but you hadn’t really had the race pay gap or the ethnicity pay gap, and the goal was to get enough noise and signatures that it would get taken to Parliament and debated, to start to impact legislation and push the Sunak government, to try to make ethnicity pay gap reporting mandatory, just the same way it is for gender pay gap.”
“I think where it caught fire was when Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, re-tweeted to his three million followers, and all of a sudden it started to bounce around.”
A generational shift?
The success of Worth Your While, and other agencies like it, is a growing testament to an alternative way of doing things, in direct juxtaposition to the asset-hoarding of the big, multinational networks.
This hands-on, much more personal approach is slowly creeping into the mainstream as more and more creatives shun the old order for smaller, more intimate agencies where they can experience greater freedom and control over their work.
And it looks like brands are taking note too, and why wouldn’t they? When leading creatives are setting up their own shops and taking away the middleman and a large chunk of the time-wasting bureaucratic machine with it.
In Worth Your While’s case however, they have a large pool of global resources on which to pull on, provided by the 29 collaborating agencies around the world that make up By The Network – who all frequently join forces to help each other on a range of projects.
While not anti-growth, the agency is certainly very wary of expanding too fast, with Ingemann explaining how they’d prefer to do things right, than simply expanding for the sake of it.
“What is growth? Is it size? Growth also comes with cost, and when you have cost, cost very quickly becomes a leading factor in decisions.
“And thus, you lose your purity, because it’s survival. You have to do it. And then you become led by money.”
Ingemann calls By The Network a sort of “hippie collective”, where creativity is the leading ideal, with any agency allowed to opt in to any brief that’s put on the table.
Is this then the future of the advertising industry? It’s hard to say for now – but the big agency networks certainly are struggling amidst a raft of mergers and thousands of job cuts.
Perhaps a smaller, stripped-back model focused on the quality of the work and not the quantity, is what brands and creatives are really looking for.
